|
And how was your day? Mine was just fine, thanks. I spent the afternoon yoyoing off and on the back of the front pack of the slow group ride. That sounds like about the right station in life for a couple of hours.
Here we were hammering it by a cornfield. Keeping up is hard!
I love this. A John Deere tractor sitting out on the corner nearest the road. That’s a tool and a display piece. And it is a welcome site.
If I rode more I’d see more.
We found a spooky barn on our bike ride today. How often do you see a barn like this?
That’s probably a little over halfway along in today’s 30-mile route. It was at the top of a long slow climb. You get up there and before you can catch your breath you are wondering about the people that lived there. House on one side of the road, two little barns on this side, all right at the top of a round hill.
Which is better than being at the bottom of the hill, but you go through there thinking, Man, mechanized automobiles are great. Isn’t it great we didn’t have to haul these materials up here by hand?
Or that’s what I’d think, anyway.
Coneflowers we found somewhere else along the way:
We stopped four times on our ride today. And that’s OK. Great day for it. Everything is growing and in the full splendor of summer. It is a sight. You want to see it all, and hold it, and then find a way to keep it for forever, because you know the season and the beauty won’t last forever. But it should. Even when it shouldn’t, it should, even when you know why it can’t.
It’s not yet July, you shouldn’t be thinking about the winter.
I thought I would take a picture of my bicycle tire:
Seemed like a good idea at the time. I’d just mounted the thing, after all. Now I need to swap the other one, so the wheel doesn’t feel bad.
We pedaled out to one of the lakes this weekend. Going out there is nice. Getting out of the lakes is a different thing, because there are hills. We thought we knew hills. We didn’t know hills. But here’s the big “everybody goes here” lake:
Allie stayed home, thank you very much. She is enjoying her afternoons on the landing in the sun.
She looks like she’s in a scene of a kitteh noir, doesn’t she?
“He walked through my door like a hooman with no tuna, all slow and clumsy with excuses for hours. No Joe I knew would think to come here without tuna, and he knew the game, so the jig was up. His rap was tired. He had the kind of expression that told me he was a hapless sort. He had bad news written all over his face. At least the pets were pretty good.”
The Yankee made an apple pie.
When that happens you enjoy your apple pie. (It was tasty.)
We had a nice little 32-mile ride on our group bike ride this evening. Of course I took pictures of me chasing people. This is is off in the wilds of the farmland:
And here we are on the suburban stretch near the end:
I took a shadow selfie on the last road before our neighborhood:
Look at these speeds:
That’s a new personal best.
The sun is big and warm and that’s just about right. Daylight comes a bit later here, since we moved, but it is still bright over dinner, and we eat late. If only it stayed like this all year around.
It seems I can’t even mow the wildflowers in the side yard, reaching up and out as they are. I am presently cutting around them.
But it is nice and warm, but not overly so. The trees are nice and green and the grass is bright. You can hear the stream babbling nearby, if there’s no noise and you get close enough you can sometimes hear it before you see it. And, for the first time in as long as I can remember, you can’t really hear any road traffic.
There are roads, of course, and there are hills. We are going up and down them. Slowly, really. We’ve been out to discover a few new restaurants, mostly when we didn’t want to cook, and met a few nice people, most of them from our new bike group.
They meet twice a week in the evenings in a church parking lot near us. And we’ve been following them around, sometimes wishing they’d go faster and sometimes wishing they’d go slower. This is the first time I’ve ever ridden in a group and it is an adjustment. But we’re learning some roads.
Otherwise, we’ve just been unpacking and resting up from the move and learning the new house and recovering from the old house. There was much to paint and move and then the professional movers, five guys out of central casting, came and packed the rest and loaded it and hauled it all away. A few days later the physical evidence of our lives caught up to us. Even the parts we thought we were staying on top of caught up with us eventually. And I’m not talking about the painting, which we’d also hired out to the professionals.
Eventually, I’m sure, everything will start to feel normal again, whatever that is. Probably after all of the boxes and wrapping paper are gone and I can find things in the kitchen again and know what light switch controls what in the new place. Everything will be normal again after that. I wonder when it started being unusual before all of that. Longer than I’d imagine, I bet.
So this is an usual quarterly report, but a proper one. We wrapped up one life and are getting ready to start a new one. So the solstice is a good time for this. Do you know where the word comes from? It’s Latin. Sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still). Nothing stands still. It is just a question of which direction you want to go.
